As presently is known, sod handling has been largely manual, and the laying of sod involves a great deal of labor. It has been previously well known to handle sod in rolls, loading the rolls onto pallets and then putting the pallets onto a truck. Fork lift trucks of conventional design have been used for this, but have limitations because the sod will tend to fall off the pallets as it is being loaded and unloaded by the truck. If a conventional fork lift truck is used to carry the pallets, the sod generally does fall off.
Thus, conventional fork lift trucks have been unable to achieve the results of handling sod easily.